Tag: travel

Back on Brady Street

August 25th, 2025

Asher starts kindergarten at Tamarack Waldorf School on September 3rd. This is obviously a big deal, both for Asher and for Karin and me. Going to school will open up a whole new world for Asher. He will get to know his teacher, and he will make friends. He will have to learn how to follow a schedule. He’s never had to do that before. Asher has mostly done what he wants when he wants, and for the most part we, as his guardians, have been okay with that. That all changes in a little over a week. He is going to have to get up early, eat breakfast, get dressed, and go to class for the morning every morning. I’m almost certain he will balk at this, at least until he gets comfortable in his class and starts looking forward to doing things with the other children.

I will mostly likely be driving Asher to class each morning. I am a morning person, unlike my wife. The Waldorf school is close to downtown Milwaukee, which means Asher and I will have a half hour drive to get him to class by 8:00 AM each day. Traffic will suck. My wife did this kind of thing with our own kids twenty-five years ago. We know the drill. Since Asher will only be there until 12:30, it is kind of iffy as to whether it is even worthwhile for me to drive back home once I drop him off. I might as well stay in area around the school while he is in class.

Tamarack is located on Brady Street on the lower eastside of Milwaukee. It’s close to Lake Michigan. Tamarack uses the old school building from St. Hedwig’s Catholic Church. The steeple of St. Hedwig’s towers over the other buildings on the street. It is the anchor for the neighborhood. The school building is ancient. It has classrooms with high ceilings, tall windows, and hardwood floors. The school has a feeling of solidity and durability. If you listen closely, you can hear the voices of previous generations of children laughing and yelling in the halls. For me, there are ghosts in the school. Even if I am surrounded by the new parents and their kids, I can still feel the presence of the people who taught and learned in that place a quarter century ago. The school contains echoes of the past, but it is also vibrant with the energy of the latest generation. It’s like life is coming full circle.

Brady Street is an interesting neighborhood. It always has been. Early on, it was an immigrant community of Germans, Poles, and Italians. St. Hedwig’s is named after a Polish saint. There is still an Italian grocery store (Glorioso’s) a few blocks away from the school. Peter Sciortino Bakery is across the street from Tamarack. During the 60’s and 70’s, Brady Street was a hippie hangout. Now, it’s a narrow road lined with bars that cater to a mostly hipster crowd, young people with money. But the neighborhood is still quirky. The community is very LGBTQ friendly. The area is ethnically diverse. Brady is a good street for walking and browsing. There is a paradoxical sense of permanence and simultaneous upheaval. It’s a neighborhood that is alive.

I came to know that area in the 1990’s. I used to go down the block from the school to the Brewed Cafe for coffee. Sometimes, I went there by myself, and sometimes with my wife. Brewed is not there anymore. They closed down a few years ago, and now the place is a Brazilian coffee shop. The new coffee house is nice enough, but it’s not Brewed. The Brewed Cafe had this scruffy, working-class, antiestablishment atmosphere. Once a person managed to get through the front door, which never really opened and closed very well, they would see numerous pamphlets and posters advertising upcoming shows by local bands or political events or art exhibits. The front counter was small and cramped. At busy times of the day, customers lined up almost all the way back to the door. Once at the counter, a person could order coffee or other beverages. They had beer (it’s Wisconsin-almost every establishment serves beer). There was a tiny kitchen in the back where people made vegan sandwiches and other dishes. The folks working at Brewed all had more than usual number of tattoos and piercings. I’m sure they worked for minimum wage, but they got to pick what music was played in the coffee shop.

Even when there were only a few customers, Brewed seemed crowded. Space was at a premium. The tables were small and wobbly. If you ordered coffee, you got that immediately. If you ordered food, it showed up eventually. The walls were covered with works by local artists. The bathrooms were microscopic in size, and the walls were plastered with graffiti and stickers for bands that I had never heard of. The place was clean, but cluttered. Over the years, it had accumulated a variety of objects that somehow lost their purpose and meaning, but remained there, nonetheless. Brewed was oddly comfortable. Going there for coffee or lunch was kind of like going into somebody’s home.

I miss that place. I will have to find another hangout on Brady Street.

Going Home

June 27th, 2025

“There’s no place like home”. – Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz

Back in July of 1976, I joined the Army. To be more specific, I was accepted as a cadet at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York. USMA is part of the U.S. Army, but it is a military organization sui generis. Nothing else in the Army, or in the world at large, even vaguely resembles it. I could try to describe it, but there isn’t enough space in this essay to make the effort worthwhile.

The first year as a student at West Point is brutal. It’s a harsh environment for a “plebe” (that’s what a freshman is called at USMA), and going to that school is kind of like attending an Ivy league college and doing time simultaneously. The first chance for a plebe to leave the place is at Christmastime. After five months of getting jerked around by upperclassmen, I was anxiously looking forward to going home for two weeks.

I didn’t get to go home. My home no longer existed.

In order to explain what I mean, I have to give some background information. Before I left for West Point, my parents had already decided to sell their house. They never mentioned any of this to me while I was still living with them. My folks loved secrecy. I grew up in a home where paranoia permeated everything. In any case, I found out about the sale of the house after it had already been sold. My parents sent me a letter with a newspaper clipping that advertised the fact that the old house was available for purchase. I did go back to my family on leave, but I went to a place I had never seen before in my life.

They say that you can never go home. That’s true. I found out immediately after I met up with my parents and brothers that I was an outsider. My five-month absence had left a vacuum in the family structure that had quickly filled. They were happy to see me, but I wasn’t an integral part of their day-to-day lives anymore. I was a just a visitor. That new status was hard to accept, at least at first.

Would it have made any difference if I had been able to go back to the house where I had grown up? Probably not. If anything, going back to that dilapidated old farmhouse would have made the change more poignant. Even if my family had remained in that home, it would not have been mine anymore. I would have still been a stranger there.

It’s been nearly fifty years since I last saw the inside of the old house. I think the structure still stands. It has to be well over one hundred years old by now. I don’t how it’s been remodeled over the years, and it really doesn’t matter. If I walked into the front door, I would still feel the presence of ghosts in the rooms. They would not be friendly ghosts. They would be there to trigger my bad memories of growing up in that place. I have plenty of dark recollections. I am not nostalgic about my childhood. I prefer not to be reminded of it.

You can’t go home. For some of us, it’s not even a good idea to try.